...takes the familiar drifting folklore-influenced soundscapes and merges them with strings and voices for an unexpected journey. The album uses the live recordings as a basis and then re-imagines them in the studio, the distant piano and drifting trumpet immediately sending the listener off into a world where edges are blunted and the things softly reverberate.
Jan Bang
7 posts
The intriguing collaboration between Jan, Erik and vocalist Sidsel Endresen on Punkt Live Remixes Volume 2 finds them sampling and remixing live pieces from the likes of Jon Hassell, 3 Trapped Tigers, Maja Ratke, Ensemble Modern and other luminaries, and with the addition of Sidsel's enigmatic vocalising, turning them into a series of diffuse, minimal atmospheres that give the listener pause to wonder quite how it has come about.
For Jan Bang's latest vocal album, he has gathered a fantastic array of like-minded travellers to assist in pursuing the dreamlike vision for this collection of gentle, heartfelt tales.
The fourth release finds another collaboration between Eivind Aarset and Jan Bang following slowly on the heels of 2020's soft-focus Snow Catches On Her Eyelashes. Pleasingly, this is not just a retread of past glories; instead they have enlisted help to produce eight incredibly varied soundscapes taking in the usual gossamer guitar and electronics, but adding guest vocals, extra bass, percussion and even trumpet.
Punkt Editions Punkt Editions is a new label curated by Jan Bang and Erik Honore. If you have any knowledge of those two names, then you will be expecting sound of a liminal nature that exists between planes with touches of jazz, electronica, ambient and more, but ever sounding like something coming to you from a dream.
Jazzland After 2019’s Dark Star Safari, Eivind Aarset and Jan Bang once again find themselves back in the studio and still pushing the boundaries of recognised musical form. Although it doesn’t quite have the subliminal quality of that album, Snow Catches On Her Eyelashes is heading in a different direction, still exploring space and texture, but paring the sounds down to electronics, samples and guitar — although you […]
Midnight Sun : Sounds Of Norway Unity Theatre, Liverpool 27 May 2003 It was with some trepidation that I went to Liverpool to see the 21st century’s version of the “package tour”. I’d been told, by someone whose opinion I trust, that most of the evening had been crap when he saw it. In fact he was a bit more splenetic than that. Still you have to find […]